(this was supposed to post on Friday, but I screwed up on the timer) I may fancy myself a bit of a Corvair-O-Phile, but there’s still lots to learn. The trip to the Ypsilanti Museum yielded some new information about the proposed gen2 modular engine. One of the other subjects we discussed there was the Corvair’s heating system(s), are lack of them, unless one ponied up for one. I made some assumptions there that need to be corrected. And unraveling that mystery also explains the missing storage area behind the rear seat starting in 1961. This Corvair heater saga once again confirms what a difficult development the Corvair had, and the challenges in bringing down its costs.

The Corvair had a difficult gestation and birth. It was Chevrolet’s Chief Engineer Ed Cole’s baby, and his obsession with rear engines and air cooling forced numerous new and advanced technologies on the company with which it had no previous experience, and was totally out of the traditional Detroit engineering comfort zone. It was conceived to be an economy car; a bigger VW, to put it most succinctly. But it was not cheap to build. That was a serious problem.

In order to build the Corvair’s complex aluminum flat six, GM had to make major new investments in a large aluminum foundry, as well design a transaxle and other unique components, never mind it being GM’s first domestic unibody. The Corvair was inevitably going to not be an economical car to build. And as the costs to build it were firming up, compromises had to be made to try to contain them.

Cole badly wanted the Corvair to come standard with the Powerglide automatic, as a key part of its advanced powertrain. A standard three-speed manual was forced on him. And the 1960 Corvair was stripped of any and every other possible convenience and safety equipment, including a sway bar or any other device to minimize its tendency to tuck under its rear wheels in extreme handling maneuvers. That whole story has been covered here.

We could go on and find so many issues that challenged GM to make the Corvair profitably, but let’s focus on its heating systems. Somewhat curiously, the Corvair was originally designed to only have an (optional) gas-fired heater. The fact that this heater was optional is not that odd, given how heaters were still generally optional on most cars; certainly in the low-priced sector. Of course how anyone other than in Florida or Hawaii might be ok without one is another question; even Southern California can get quite chilly in the winter.

In the typical Cole engineering-heavy approach, the Corvair’s trunk-mounted gas heater worked great. A similar system was optional on VWs, and not uncommon in Canada and some US northern states. But it was of course expensive, and also reduced fuel economy considerably. The result was that a Powerglide and heater-equipped Corvair was pushing right up against the Biscayne, price-wise.

There were other issues with the 1960 Corvair that were seen to make it vulnerable to the competition from the Falcon and Valiant. One of them was the front trunk, where the spare was located, was problematically small. But like VW, the 1960 Corvair offered at least a partial solution, due to extra space available behind the rear seat. That area, shown in brown above, was a good-sized well that could be accessed more advantageously with the optional (of course) fold down rear seat.

This restored 1960 sedan shows how that area was flat with the folded rear seat, and created a considerable-sized storage area, assuming no rear passengers. And of course it was even easier to access on the four door. Actually, the original well went even farther back a few more inches, behind the panel in which those after-market speakers are mounted. But this is the best sedan picture I could find.

And here’s the coupe version.

It’s hard to overstate the range of major changes made to the 1961 Corvair, which resulted in the 1960 model being somewhat of an orphan, parts-wise. These changes, including a substantially revised engine that now had 145 C.I. (140 formerly), new front end sheet metal that created a convex face from the previously concave one, new rear axle ratios, and many others.

But perhaps the biggest one, along with the larger engine, was a new heating system (still optional, but at lower cost). It now utilized the heat from the exhausts via heat exchangers in that area behind the rear seat, and even tapped cold air from the fan housing so that hot and cold air could be blended for the right temperature. And there was a three speed fan to help keep that warm air moving to the front of the car, including the defroster outlets. A pretty major new re-work, for a one year-old car.

The price to pay for the cheaper heater was the loss of that rear storage well. The optional fold-down seat was still available, but there was now mostly a shallow well above the heater. My ’63 Monza 4 door had the fold down rear seat, and I did use it for my longer trips, as it made a nice flat loading surface, but I had remembered seeing that deep well on some 1960 Corvairs, and always wondered what happened to it. Now I know!

And speaking of that new Corvair heater, how well did it work? Well, I distinctly remember a drive on I80 from Perry Iowa back to Iowa City on a bitter cold evening, and the Corvair could not maintain a comfortable temperature inside. By the way, that’s something that never happened to my in my two VW Beetles, which generated plenty of heat once warmed up, although one absolutely had to keep the vent window cracked very slightly, otherwise the VW’s practically air-tight body kept the heat from flowing in properly.

Despite this not being a “stale air heater” (using the actual engine’s heated cooling directly, like pre-1963 VWs), I’ve also read that this heater had at least one recall to fix a problem with carbon monoxide getting into the passenger compartment. Chevrolet downplayed the issue somewhat, and said that in the worst case, “it would take 8 hours of driving to make the driver dangerously drowsy”. I remember some 15 hour drives in my Corvair, and the heating air didn’t always smell like a bouquet.

I have no doubt that the reason Cole originally went with the gas-fired heater was because he determined that that the maximum output through heat exchangers, which are from from 100% efficient, would be insufficient in very cold temperatures. The gas heater was still an option in 1962, by which time the engine-heat unit was standard. But by 1963, it was not listed anymore.

One of the other big changes for 1961 involved moving the spare from the front trunk to the engine compartment (1964 shown here).

That, along with the new convex front fascia, increased luggage space in the front. Was it also done to compensate for the loss of luggage space behind the rear seat? Probably a combination. One thing is for certain: moving the the spare tire from the front and hanging it out over behind the back axle did nothing to help the Corvair’s weight bias.

Presumably, the many drastic changes to the ’61 Corvair improved production costs; in any case, Chevrolet lowered the starting prices for 1961 by some 3%, undoubtedly to improve its competitiveness against the Falcon, which was a huge seller.

All these changes were actually relatively unimportant compared to the most important one of all: the 1960.5 Monza coupe. It completely changed the Corvair’s image and market trajectory; instead of a bare-bones economy car, the Corvair, in the form of the Monza, was now a stylish and sporty compact car, the first of its kind. It may have cost as much as a Biscayne, but it was essentially an mini-Impala, and conveyed about as much (or more) positive image for its delighted owners. Needless to say, the Monza’s surprisingly big success spawned the Mustang and all of the other smaller sporty and ‘personal cars’ to come. Americans in the 60s were ready for cars to reflect individuality, personality, style and image at an affordable price, and the Monza did just that. Leave the cheap economy car market to to others to fight over…like the Japanese.

48 Comments

my first car a 63 nova CHEVY II It would have been cool to drive a Monza
and see how I liked it My nova and the Monza were supposed to be the
sporty fancy little chevy But such different cars Like coming from different
planets I wonder how long after the Corvair’s introduction they started
on the chevy II

Within a few months of the Corvair’s introduction, Chevy brass were getting feedback from dealers wanting something more conventional to counter the success of the Falcon. Chevy accidentally stumbled upon the Monza concept, while at the same time launching a crash-development program for a conventional compact. The Chevy II debuted in 1962. Pretty good turnaround, considering it could have been no earlier than February or March of 1960 that the dealers’ panicked calls started coming in.

I started work for a Wisconsin Ford dealer in 68. We regularly got Corvair trade-ins. Some had a gas heater. Some just had the factory heater.

You’d think a rear engine car would be a hot commodity in winter. Yet a Corvair without a gas heater was considered saleproof once the snow flew. By late fall, any Corvair without one had a shop order waiting for us to install a gas heater.

If we had only one used Corvair, the heater was installed right away. If we had more than one, the car with the heater was used to show a prospective buyer what we’d install in whichever Corvair they chose. I guess our used car manager harbored the hope that on some unseasonably warm day, someone might actually buy a used Corvair without checking for a gas heater. Never saw it actually happen though. I think by the time I started work, Corvairs had been around long enough that the deficiencies of the stock heaters were well known by most northern car buyers.

Our parts guys always supplied a VW unit. I never knew Corvair had their own version of that heater. Guess we never got a 60 model in trade. The VW heater was an easy install and people loved ’em. You could start the gas heater without starting the car. It worked much faster than the heater in a normal car because you didn’t have to wait for the engine to warm up.

Our neighbors got one of the first 1960 Corvairs – a blue sedan like the one in the ad above. I did not know until now that their optional gas heater was the only choice of heater for that year. The car also had Powerglide. Their other new car for 1960 was a Buick Invicta. Perhaps that is why I never heard them complain about gas mileage in the Corvair. The gas heater worked well in northern Indiana winters – it kept us very warm going to church on Sunday mornings. This Corvair was kept in service for many years and was well liked by all family members, eventually passed down to the youngest boy when he got his license. The whole family, including the wife, was mechanically inclined, and they carried extra belts, etc. and did their own maintenance, no doubt key to the car’s long life.

This 1959 video from Ford shows the details of the ’60 Corvair (along with the ’60 Falcon), points out the gas heater fuel consumption and front mounted spare blocking trunk space, shows the large well behind the rear seat, etc.

Thank you for the information. I have often wondered how the passenger compartments of cars with air-cooled engines are heated. I assumed it involved redirecting hot air from around the engine, but never imagined a gasoline-powered device. That seems a rather complex solution, though a great way to produce a lot of heat as long as exhaust can be kept out of the cabin. Chevrolet’s apparently relaxed attitude about CO exposure is perhaps a sign of the times. It is hard to imagine an automobile manufacturer espousing such a publicly cavalier approach to safety now.

It is hard to imagine an automobile manufacturer espousing such a publicly cavalier approach to safety now.

When the government started investigating reports of the Chevy Cobalt’s electric power steering randomly cutting out, GM’s initial response was that, if the steering quit, a warning light on the instrument panel would light. All the driver had to do, they said, was pull off the road, shut the engine off then restart it (presumably to reboot the computer) and the power steering should start working again. As if it never occurred to GM that power steering shouldn’t randomly quit in the first place.

Ah, the Chevy Cobalt, the experiences with this car that I bought new and optioned how I wanted will keep me from buying anything GM ever again. Even just ten years later, they are getting thin on the ground.

That gas heater reminds me of the one I had in the back of my 74 vw van. It worked well until I needed it at about -20 degrees Celsius and then it would trip a breaker on the side of the heater. It had a very expensive Swiss watch like switch that had a timer built into it. I special ordered one from the local vw dealer for $250 CDN in 1990’s money to see if that was the issue. The parts guy warned me it wouldn’t be returned if I drive out of the parking lot. I plugged it in and it still wouldn’t work properly so I returned it. I never could get it working properly and none of the repair shops would touch it as they figured it would burn the van up. Any time I found a switch at a wreckers I would buy one for $2. I think I still have a bunch in the garage. I sure like the 2 heaters the Previa has for the cold Canadian winter mornings.

One thing I recall from owning a ’63 Corvair is the pair of air duct tubes that carried the warm air from the rear of the car to registers in the front footwell, and the defroster outlets. They ran inside of the door sills, and were routinely rotted away as the cars got older. I’ve seen dryer duct and other flexible tubing used to repair them, and when repaired properly the difference is tremendous…but the heat output is still nowhere near as good as in most other cars.

In my convertible, the idea of heated air in the winter was largely academic, given the unlined top and plastic rear window…

Yeah. Many complaints about inadequate heat in Corvairs stem from some problem with the hoses. In addition to the ones in the rockers, there are two hoses going from the heat exchangers to the air distribution box, and those are exposed to the elements and engine heat. All the hoses are available from Clarks and the system is decent when it is in good order. (Full disclosure; I live in Philly, not the frozen zones of Wisconsin)

By the way, it’s easier to replace hoses than it is to rebuild rotted out metal heat channels like on VW Buses.

The CO problem comes if you have an exhaust leak at certain places. Fix the exhaust leak, no CO.

And the ’65-9 Corvair uses a flat plastic duct inside the tunnel panel cover to bring the heat forward. One duct instead of two, solid plastic instead of hoses. Works quite a bit better.

Another very common upgrade is to use a heater fan motor from a Cadillac. It pushes a lot more air in High (the circuit in the car removes all resistance in that position). This fan draws a lot more current though in the High position so it’s highly recommended to install a relay with a direct, larger-diameter feed, so the fan does not overheat the stock harness.

My drivers education car was a standard 60 (probably) or 61 Corvair. I bought a new 1966 VW beetle while stationed in Canada. It had a gas heater although it never worked for me so it may have been just a switch. Corvair and vw had equally miserable heaters. Probably why I live in the south. Anecdotal I know. Ymmv

My ’68 bug had a gas heater integrated in the normal engine supplied system. This worked great. It had a small exhaust pipe and tiny muffler that came out under the left rear fender. You just pulled up on the heater lever all the way to start it. Rear seat passengers would complain that their ankles were burning. My ’73 had the cylindrical type in the front trunk which quit soon after the “warranty” had expired (as you drove out of the dealer lot). As was said above, no-one would work on it and it stayed inoperative. A relative had his Karmann Ghia burn up because the gas heater malfunctioned.

Thanks for a very informative article. It really is hard to imagine how drivers made do without heaters back in the day. I remember reading James Herriot’s books years ago, and he had some less-than-fond memories of shivering around rural England in unheated Austins. Made one chilly just imagining it. Also, after driving through a few Iowa winters myself, I applaud your fortitude for that Corvair trip: Brrr!

While those James Herriot books were largely pre-WWII, even in the early 1960s heaters were still optional at the bottom end of the UK economy car market. Perhaps that’s why driving gloves were so popular!

I am fascinated by the big picture view of GM and technology, as demonstrated by the Corvair. GM was the biggest car company in the world in Ed Cole’s day, and if it didn’t have the best engineering talent in the world, it certainly had the money to buy it.

Ed Cole tried a lot of things; the Corvair, the aluminum engine, the transaxle, (and the OHC six?) and others. All the experiments ultimately crashed and burned, becoming dead ends.

It seems like America wanted big pretty boxes with huge engines and skinny tires, for cheap. GM gave America what it wanted and America ate it up, but following this path led to their ultimate doom.

I wonder what GM should have done. Still build those pretty boxes, but with better quality and let Ford win the price war? Force one of the divisions to be the experimenter, (“If it’s a weird idea, it’s an Oldsmobile”)? Spread out the experimental designs, but build them in small numbers at a loss till the (whatever) technology was perfected? Slow down the design to production path? Looking at the Corvair, it sure seems like the design was pushed out to production long before it was ready- also see Vega, Citation, Quad 4, Northstar.

How could the ship have been saved? Sometimes, I get the impression that, like the French Monarchy, there was no path that could have saved GM. The world changed and GM couldn’t. …Could it?

Ed Cole tried a lot of things; the Corvair, the aluminum engine, the transaxle, (and the OHC six?) and others. All the experiments ultimately crashed and burned, becoming dead ends.

GM has a long history of early adaptation of really useful inventions: electric starter, synchromesh transmission, one piece steel roof stamping, recirculating ball steering, automatic transmission. Kettering was working at GM when he started experimenting with adding TEL to gas. The early 60s was another period of innovation with GM trying one powertrain approach with the Corvair, a different approach with the Tempest and a conventional approach at Buick and Olds.

I agree with Paul on the Corvair being the most influential car of its decade, but most of the influence was on the visual design of European cars (NSU, Fiat, BMW). At least one Monza prototype was a pillarless hardtop:

And he’s right about the Monza triggering the Mustang too. Most people forget, however, that Ford’s Mustang prototype from 1962 was mid-engined like the Monza GT show car, but a V4 with side-mounted radiators. More Corvair influence? Not sure, but heady stuff for this era:

With my first three cars, all VW bugs with rusted pans, heater boxes and channels, there was virtually no heat or defrost air making it’s way past the rear seat. I had my ice scraper and a can of windshield de-icer (ether based so I had to have the windows lowered somewhat) handy to keep the inside glass frost free. I had a front mounted gas heater in the first one but could only use it for the initial warm up of the interior. The flexible steel exhaust pipe ran into the front wheel well but the exhaust from it found it’s way into the interior. I was living in western and central NY, and it was the early 70’s.

On the other side of the world in Israel we somehow survived without air conditioning at over 90° ambient temps during the looooooooooong summers. Lots of water and wet towels as well as open windows were the trick. Cloth seat covers to insulate one from flesh-burning vinyl were also common.

Although a gasoline heater sounds odd to our modern ears, drivers of 1960 would have been very familiar with it. Stewart-Warner’s South Wind brand of gasoline heaters had been a very popular aftermarket accessory in the 1930s and 1940s when car heaters were less common (or not as good) as we have become used to.

I had no idea that there was such a massive difference between the 1960 Corvairs and all of those that came later.

Yes–if one compares a 1960 Corvair shop manual with 1961, they are basically the same size. Many, many things were changed to the point where the procedures for servicing / fixing them had to be rewritten. Very similar results when comparing parts lists. (Pick up a Clark’s Corvair parts book and notice how many items are “1960 only” or “1961 – 1964” or even “1961 – 1969” but not 1960. Vast amount.)

I started calling the 1960 model the “beta version” years ago. 1961 more or less re-launched the car.

Southwind was one of the most popular and well known of the gas fired models, but there were many. There were also conventional engine coolant based aftermarket heaters. For a hot rod project I bought a round version that bolted to the inside of the firewall below the dash. It had a small “radiator” and fan with hinged doors to control the air flow. The only switch was for the fan. I don’t know if a valve was used to cut off the flow of heated coolant. It wouldn’t have been hard to install a manual valve in the hose like some early British sports cars. Here’s a Southwind ad.

What strikes me about the 1960 Corvair ads is how unfocused they are. They were still positioning the Corvair as a mainstream small car, just one that’s supposed to be higher-tech then its competitors, or at least different. There’s no sense of its real-world positioning as a sporty European-style car; they were trying to market it as a low-buck economy car which should have obviously been a dead end given its manufacturing costs.

It wouldn’t be long before the Corvair found its niche in the form of the Monza coupe, with the Chevy II rushed to market to cover the territory originally envisioned for the Corvair. The Monza would be the image leader for sporty coupes until the Mustang arrived, making it clear that the Corvair cost too much to build even for a sporty car.

One of the first big shows I hit at the Gilmore after I retired was apparently the national Corvair owner’s meet, which has not been back to the Gilmore since. I did not see that many Corvairs in one place when they were new.

Not having followed Corvairs closely, I learned some interesting things about them. Not only the gas fueled heater, but the bottom trim models had no windshield washers and only one speed wipers, things that would be regarded as totally unacceptable today, when people react with shock and horror when confronted by a car with no a/c and crank windows.

Effective heating and defrosting was an issue as I grew up here in Michigan. People took to the electric wire rear window defrosters in a hot second when they were introduced. I saw a lot of cars with add on aftermarket rear window defrosters. The add on kit amounted to a grid of metal foil with adhesive on it that was applied to the rear window, with the necessary wiring switch and relay.

One day, I saw a VW Bug with one of those rear window kits installed on the windshield. I stopped to look at this 66 Ambassador that was for sale last year, and noticed that it had one of the aftermarket defroster kits installed on the back window.

I once drove a mid-70s GM Colonade coupe – can’t remember if it was a Cutlass or a Chevelle – with a warm air type rear defroster, and I have to say I don’t get what was so inferior about them compared to electric wire defrosters. At least in the local (DC area) climate, the window would often defog almost immediately – much faster than electric wires and without lines going through the view. Even in colder or more humid conditions, it wasn’t any slower clearing a decent section of the window as modern defoggers are.

Going slightly off topic here but diesels also have a problem with weak heaters so Webasto and Eberspacher still do a good business selling both aftermarket & OEM heater systems. A lot of these are dual duty units that both heat the interior and the engine cooling water and have timers or remotes. Landrover actually installed a Webasto unit as standard equipment n the Freelander TD4

I priced an espacher unit out for my old vw van about a decade ago. Apparently it would fit in the original location and had a thermostat switch. You could set the temp and it would blast heat (very important up here in the great white north). They had a gas or diesel model as I recall. Anyway the price was in the neighbourhood of $2000 which was about what the van was worth. I couldn’t swing it at the time and figured I would have to get a separate insurance policy for the heater.

Almost 20 years ago, I became the owner of a 1980 Jet Electrica 007 (an EV made from a Dodge Omni 024) that came with a Webasto gas-fired heater. The vehicle had a 3-gallon plastic gas tank, filled from the car’s original tank filler opening (that had a small decal stating “gasoline for heater only” or similar verbiage).

When I talked to the previous owner of the vehicle, they told me that during the winter when the heater was used, the car got about 20 miles to the gallon! Wrap your mind around that!

all this talk about car heaters I have a facts guide here for 59 fords Thunderbird!
magic air HEATER optional equipment You know if had a Studebaker car with
no heater I might think well its warmer in here than a Studebaker covered wagon !
You need to think about the way it was before This kind of thinking might make
you feel better when your car a/c craps out

Fascinating article. I never knew there was so much difference between the 60s and the 61s. That gas heater sounds downright dangerous. I`d opt for the other one if I were buying a `Vair in `61. Now,for the $64,000 question. An article on Air Conditioned Corvars from those years.

Paul’s articles on the engineering of the Corvair (including focused articles on stuff like the HVAC sub-system) has definitely given me a greater appreciation for the car and how much effort and money was put into the project. It was a noble experiment for GM and a shame the promising little car didn’t pan out.

Moreover, Corvair discussion is actually rather timely, considering how well GM scored with the revolutionary 2011 Chevrolet Volt, a vehicle which could conceivably be eclipsed by the all-electric 2017 Chevrolet Bolt. All indication are the Bolt has a real-world range of 238 miles, holding the real possibility of being a game-changer for personal travel, crossing over into the mainstream as an EV that can be driven nearly identically as an ICE-powered vehicle (except maybe long-distance trips) and, unlike Tesla’s vehicles, is actually affordable for the average consumer.

Great piece Paul, I love this type of article., I have a big soft spot for Corvairs although I haven’t much direct experience. My maternal grandfather owned one for sometime in the 60’s, even though he usually bought Chryslers. It was a car my mom fondly remembered as it was one of the cars she’d learned to drive on.